27 Jun ‘Being in the body’: the skill that quiets overthinking
If most of your day happens in your head — replaying conversations, rehearsing meetings that haven’t happened yet, narrating your own life as you live it — you’re not alone.
Being in the body is the practical alternative: a trainable skill of shifting attention from thought to physical sensation, and it can calm an overactive nervous system in seconds.
I’ve become obsessed with this idea of spending less time in my head, and more time in my body. So much of why we feel stuck, confused, and overwhelmed, I think, comes down to one thing: we’ve lost the ability to feel our bodies.
Now, I know that sounds so abstract. So floaty. So “that’s cute but I’ve got places to be people to see, ain’t got time for this.”
I get it.
For too long, the language around all of this (energy, presence, “your body holds the wisdom”) has lived almost exclusively in spiritual and wellness spaces. Beautiful language for some people. But it’s also exactly the kind of language that makes a rational, skeptical mind check out before it’s even given the underlying idea a fair hearing.
And that’s a real loss, because the idea itself holds up fine without any of that language.
So I’m giving myself the challenge to find ways to explain this in words that resonate with the rational crowd. The type A personalities. The skeptics. The people who sense that something about the current way of living isn’t really working, but don’t resonate with the spiritual or touchy-feely side of the spectrum either.
What ‘being in the body’ actually means
Let me put it this way:
‘Being in the body’ is simply the skill of movement of attention.
You’re moving attention away from thoughts, and toward sensations.
That can be a contact point, like the feeling of your feet on the floor or your back against the chair. Or it can be something internal. Like the movement of your breath, your heart rate, tightness in the gut, tension in the shoulders, that subtle sense of energy and aliveness.
It comes down to one simple question:
Which input is dominating your conscious awareness right now? Thoughts, or sensations?
Either you’re thinking about yourself (conceptual self-awareness), or you’re feeling yourself (embodied self-awareness).
We’re extremely good at the first one. So good that, for most of us, it’s the only mode we ever run. And yet, there’s real-world value in spending more time in the second one too.
Why your brain can’t think its way out of a thought spiral
First of all, thoughts don’t have an off switch.
When we get stuck in ruminative or anxious thoughts, our first instinct is almost always to problem-solve or analyze our way out of it. We try to control the mind with the mind. The problem is: that’s a losing battle. You can replay the same worry for the tenth time and it still won’t feel resolved.
I’m sure you’ve lived at least one of these scenarios:
- Lying in bed at 5 am, looping on that morning’s meeting. You know more thinking and planning won’t change anything. The meeting hasn’t happened yet, and you’ve already rehearsed it ten times. But you just can’t settle.
- Replaying something you said in an email or a conversation hours later, dissecting how it landed, even though there’s nothing left to do about it.
- Lying awake the night before something big — a trip, a decision, a hard conversation — running through every way it could go wrong.
- Mid-disagreement with someone, already thinking of your next argument in your head instead of actually hearing what they’re saying.
In every one of these, the mind tries to solve “the problem” by staying in the very mode that’s causing it: more thinking.
The thing that actually works is different: stop feeding the thinking, and simply change the track entirely.
And I mean that literally.
When researchers scan people’s brains while they reflect on themselves narratively (replaying, judging, planning) versus when they simply notice a moment of physical sensation, different brain circuits light up.
Thinking about yourself activates the brain’s default storytelling network, the same one running your inner monologue on a loop.
Noticing a sensation activates entirely different brain networks, including a region called the insula, which tracks your body’s moment-to-moment state.
That’s what makes body sensations a genuinely fast off-ramp from a thought spiral. You’re not fighting it on its own turf anymore. You’ve just left the building. And once you’ve left, you get something simple but valuable: a gap. Not a guarantee of calm, and not a flood of new ideas. Just a brief pause where you’re no longer being swept along by the next automatic thought in the chain.
Even if the gap is small, it can be the difference between reacting to a loop and getting to choose what happens next.
The body signals you miss when you’re stuck in your head
There’s another piece to this.
Thoughts are almost exclusively focused on the past or future. While you’re narrating and replaying, you’re not tracking the state you’re actually in, in that moment. Tension building in your shoulders, fatigue creeping in, the hum of low-grade stress. That information is there the whole time, influencing the state of your nervous system. You’re just not listening to it. Which means you can end up making decisions — what you say, how you respond, how you show up — from a state you didn’t even know you were in.
This matters more than it might seem. Interoceptive awareness (our ability to sense these internal body signals) has been linked in research to better emotional regulation and lower stress. That makes total sense: it’s hard to regulate a state you can’t feel in the first place. (I wrote more on the science of interoception here.)
So my point is:
This isn’t about claiming that “feeling is better than thinking.” We absolutely need both. It’s that most of us have let the pendulum swing so far toward thinking that we’ve lost the other skill entirely. And the cost of that imbalance is real: more rumination and anxiety, more stuck-ness, less awareness of our own state, more decisions made on autopilot.
The good news is: shifting from one to the other takes seconds. No apps or fancy gadgets required. We all have that innate capacity. We simply need to practice it.
Of course, “being in the body” is so foreign and uncomfortable territory for most of us, and relearning it from scratch, with zero structure, is hard. I think that’s why I was so immediately drawn to breathwork and why it’s become such an important practice for me. It’s not open-ended “just feel yourself.” It it’s a rhythm to follow, a pattern to track, something concrete that pulls you into sensation instead of asking you to find your own way there.